By way of background concerning some conventional systems, computing devices have traditionally executed applications and data services locally to the device. Yet, with the evolution of on-line and cloud services, applications and data services are increasingly being moved to network providers who perform some or all of a given service on behalf of devices. The evolution of network storage farms capable of storing terabytes of data (with potential for petabytes, exabytes, etc. of data in the future) has created an opportunity to mimic the local scenario in a cloud, with separation of the primary device and the external storage.
The separation of the storage of the data from the data owners and publishers, and as further separated from application developers and consumers of the data, however, creates issues that are not present where the data is represented unrestricted on a consumer's local device as in the past—a situation that has concerned content owners due to potential compromise, re-distribution and unrestricted use of the data. However, no cloud service or network storage provider has been able to effectively provide information as a service on any platform, with publishers, developers, and consumers able to easily publish, specialize apps for and consume any kind of data, in a way that can be tracked and audited for all involved and such that publishers can be guaranteed restrictions on their content can be enforced. Moreover, for content owners or publishers who have especially valuable data, the concerns over controlling access to the data becomes even more important. Once relinquishing such valuable data to a networked storage service, questions such as who gains access, what kinds of queries are exposed to the consumers or developers, are difficult to answer without proprietary, custom solutions designed for the particular kind of data.
The above-described deficiencies of today's networked storage services are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.